You Will Make A More If You have Your Own Product

Who is going to buy your product?

You won't make more money if it isn't worth owning.

So before you write it... create it. Figure out your marketing plan.

Just because you read online some guys says this or that doesn't mean it's true, and it doesn't mean that you will make more money doing it.

Well the first thing I would ask you is how are you making money promoting other people's products? Why can't you do the same for your own? If you make pretty good money being an affiliate, then you should be able to make really good money promoting your own stuff.

Also, I see you are a War Room member, have you done a WSO? There are people on here that exclusively do WSO's and make a living from that. Best of luck and please let me know if I can help you in anyway. Congrats on making your first product!

You will make a greater percentage of the profit, usually, but not necessarily make more money over being an affiliate.

Wal-Mart makes a whole lot more selling other people's products. Barnes and Nobel make more money than most of the individual writers.

I don't know a thing about making software, yet I've made quite a bit selling software products.

Suppose it's just a matter of where you want to invest your resources. Product creation, testing, developing, support, affiliates...or just persuading people to buy.

If you were having success as an affiliate and now you are struggling, why move backwards?

People make more money as a vendor as they have more affiliates generating more sales than they could on their own - much more, and even giving out 75% commissions once you have 4 strong affiliates then you make more money overall than you would on your own.

There is more potential but it isn't easy - now comes the long battle of learning affiliate marketing from the vendor side, writing affiliate materials, testing, making your product convert, and of course recruiting affiliates

Affiliates won't come flocking to you, even if you list the product in Clickbank. Your listing will be buried on the last page in your category and few will see it. You will likely get affiliates over time, but not the big ones you want unless you go out and recruit them.

If you can orchestrate some kind of meaningful product launch, and get a few big affiliates in your niche promoting for you, you can get some serious traffic to your sales page. One of the biggest things a product launch does is it helps the product vendor grow their list in a short period of time. You msut have an opt-in form on your sales page.

Sure, the gurus make a killing in the weeks following their launch, but equally important is the list building aspect. A list doesn't last forever. You will constantly have people unsubscribe and in general, the older the list becomes the less responsive it gets. You need a constant infusion of new subscribers to keep your list hot.

Many of the big marketers have lists in excess of 100,000 names and boast of that. But it isn't the size of the list that matters. It's what kind of open rate you get (how many people actually open your emails) combined with how many of them are hungry buyers. If you've got a high percentage of freebie seekers your list won't be as productive as if it is populated highly with people willing and able to buy.

I'm not promoting anything here, but I've always considered Michael Rasmussen's "Get More Buyers" to be in a class of its own in terms of showing how to funnel traffic and grow lists effectively. He's one of the guys I try to keep an eye on because he is not only very intelligent, he's a good teacher.

Another thing about a possible product launch, you can't just to go potential JV partners and say, "Sell this and you can make some good money." Trust me, they know how to make money without you. One of their big concerns is that they don't want to promote junk to their list no matter how much they can make. If you hit your list with junk they become less likely to buy in the future. And, the big guys have buddies who have promoted for them in the past and they must reciprocate to keep on geed terms with them.

There are lots of product launches every day. You must be able to give big JV partners a compelling reason to come on board with you. If you have promoted for them in the past, if you belong to one of their membership sites, if you have interviewed them, if you have met them face to fact at a conference... these things form connections and build relationships. The more connecting points yo have, the more likely some of the big dogs will promote for you.

You should also be able to give evidence to them of how well your sales letter converts. Maybe you have some PPC stats or something like that to use to convince them. --Mike

Offer the product for review(free) to some of the top people on this site.

Ask their honest feedback.

If the product sucks, they'll tell you how to improve it.

If the product is good, they might promote to their list.

My first product launch was 2 weeks ago. I had a mentor fire it off to his list (100's of sales).

I contacted a guru, he's interested.

Another guru contacted me, working on that JV right now.

Regards,
PCRoger.

I'm in the same boat as the OP, but slightly further along. I'm focused on two things right now that may be helpful here.

1. Testing and revising my sales page. I'm pushing people to it via a AdWords just to see if they make it to the buy now page. I'm tweaking based on that data.

2. I'm also building out my affiliates page. This is the page where affiliates can get banners, etc from me.

Good luck.

Mike McMillan got it exactly right. I just wanted to add my thoughts to what he said.

Don't think that just because you have an affiliate resources page, good commish, and what you think to be the next big thing that affiliates (or JVs) will flock to your site. In fact, don't even assume that putting a product up on Clickbank will lead to any amount of sales worth writing home about.

Big affiliates and JV partners (you know who I'm talking about) are very selective about what they promote because they want to maximize earnings with each campaign. They also promote stuff by people they like, but of course, they wouldn't promote this stuff if it wasn't going to be profitable.

Make sure your product is solid. Make sure you have a good sales funnel in place. Make sure you have solid copy (sales letter, video, emails, etc.). And make sure you can prove to potential affiliates and JVs that they will pretty much effortlessly make a ton of money by promoting your product (show EPC, conversions, etc.).

After all, why the heck would someone promote your stuff and maybe make a little money when they could promote someone else's tuff and definitely make a lot of money?

Dino - I would first take the time to make sure your product, website and sales funnel are excellent. Your product must be informative and insightful, your site professional-looking, and your sales funnel complete (back-end profits are way more important than front-end profits). Then, I would seek out some JV partners (not affiliates) to test out the conversions and to see if your product is worth buying.

Last thing I'll leave you with is to NOT be cheap. If you can't afford good graphics or good copy (for example), then do what it takes to be able to afford these things. Ramp up your current affiliate campaigns or barter if you have to. Just make sure every facet of your product is top notch. Nothing turns off JVs and affiliates faster than a crappy product with crappy conversions, crappy design, crappy copy...crappy everything.

Curtis

I don't know about digital products, but as far as physical products go, this is the truth. I used to resell (which is similar to promoting an affiliate product) other products, but once I got a couple people together in China to make my own products, that's when I made some serious cash.

Anyone know what I was selling?

...Silicone Anal Plugs.

It's good to diversify to become a merchant as you're building a long term asset which is your brand. For a start, might wanna create a pdt and list it on Clickbank

Thanks for all the great answers people. I have already created the prodcut now
am contacting some copywriter and other successful product owners here on the
forum that can help me set up a sales funnel, thanks you page.......

@BigMike

The good thing is that my affilaite marketing websites pretty much run on autopilot
so this allows me to focus more on my product and it gives me the money to invest.

Making your own product is about 10 times more difficult than promoting someone else'

Remember that your job doesn't merely end with making the product. You have to market it, deal with customer complaints, and provide after sales service.